In 1892 the brothers Mohammad and Ali Al Hamoud Alshaya founded their trading business in Kuwait: fabrics, foodstuffs, and whatever the country then needed in the way of trade supplies. Four years later they opened an office in Bombay.
The step that explains the rest
The office in India was not only a shipping point. The brothers sent a number of their sons there for two reasons set down in the source: to learn the skills of trade, and to learn the English language, which was not available in Kuwait at the time. Among them were Saleh Ali Alshaya, Abdulaziz Mohammad Alshaya and Ahmad Saleh Alshaya.
That is to say, the family treated language the way it treated goods: something brought in from abroad because the local market did not produce it.
What came after oil
When Kuwait began to rise after oil was discovered and exported, the company’s activity widened into contracting, building materials, cars, hotels and retail.
In 1966 the first Sheraton outside the United States opened in Kuwait — the first five-star hotel under international management on the Arabian Peninsula. Others followed, among them a hotel in Medina and a second in Kuwait.
In 1983 the first Mothercare shop opened, the first foreign brand run under franchise. Through that door the family entered international retail: cosmetics in 1992, coffee shops in 1999, and pharmacies and optics after 2005.
A detail in the history
The group’s official website dates the beginning to 1890; the Al Anba investigation dates it to 1892 and names the two brothers. The difference is two years, and we record it as it stands without preferring one.
What is worth pausing on
The beginning was a trade bringing other people’s goods to a local market. The end, a century and a third later, is running other people’s brands in other people’s markets. What has not changed is that the business rests on moving what is made in one place to whoever buys it in another. Only the length of the distance has changed.
Among the family’s contributions alongside other Kuwaiti houses: founding the Kuwait Oil Tanker Company, the Kuwait Red Crescent, the popular committee for collecting donations, and the Ahlia Insurance Company.
Photo: Bombay harbour in the 1890s. By the Photoglob Company, public domain via Wikimedia Commons and the Library of Congress.
Sources: the Al Anba newspaper investigation into the Alshaya family, 26 February 2010; and the timeline on the official website of the Alshaya Group.
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